Embedded Power Management Challenges Grow


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Power management always has been, and will continue to be, a big issue with electronic devices. But when it comes to power management in embedded systems—controlling battery power in a smartphone, an industrial automation or automotive application, among a myriad of other options—the approaches come with different variables. For example, deeply embedded s... » read more

First Silicon At 14nm


By Ed Sperling The first 14nm test chips are beginning to roll out the door from foundries, and companies are beginning to trumpet their success. But before anyone pops the champagne corks, there are some caveats. First of all, what most people are billing as 14nm chips are actually mostly 20nm. They are readily willing to concede that point, settling on 16nm, but the reality is that it’s... » read more

All Things To All Customers


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Low-Power High-Performance Engineering recently spoke with Suresh Menon, VP of systems development at Lattice Semiconductor, about the challenges of directing the development of power-sensitive FPGAs from architectural decisions to identifying the target applications. What follows are excerpts of that discussion. LPHP: When you look at the products that Lattic... » read more

All Things To All Customers


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Low-Power High-Performance Engineering recently spoke with Suresh Menon, VP of systems development at Lattice Semiconductor, about the challenges of directing the development of power-sensitive FPGAs from architectural decisions to identifying the target applications. What follows are excerpts of that discussion. LPHP: When you look at the products that Lattic... » read more

What Happened To Statistical Static Timing Analysis?


About five years ago if you listened to the marketing messages in the EDA industry, you would have thought it would be impossible to produce chips without statistical static timing analysis (SSTA). Fast forward to now and the industry seems to have put this approach on the back burner. So what happened? “The idea was that if you modeled your design instead of using a corner-based approa... » read more

Adventures In Verification


By Ed Sperling Design complexity can be almost bit-mapped with verification complexity. There are so many things that need to be verified in a design these days that full coverage has become almost possible to guarantee. That has created a market for tools to help with the verification process—formal, functional, physical—and different methodologies for using those tools. But how to app... » read more

What’s Ahead For System-Level Design


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Architecting an SoC today is incredibly difficult. When you add in the number of available transistors, the manufacturing effects of smaller nodes, IP and software that must be integrated, among other things, the challenges just keep mounting. Depending on what market segment the SoC will be designed into has a huge impact, as well. “It is impossible to ove... » read more

Taking Stock Of Models


By Ann Steffora Mutschler The world of modeling in SoC design is multi-dimensional to say the least. One dimension contains the model creators and providers, while the other is comprised of the types of models that exist in the marketplace. “What we’re seeing today is that we have basically models coming from either IP providers—the people that are actually producing those cores ... » read more

Executive Outlook


By Ed Sperling The view from the top of companies is a like a high-level of abstraction for viewing the industry. While engineers get caught up in individual projects, or pieces of projects, CEOs and CTOs tend to see things from a much broader perspective. So what do they see as the big issues and developments over the next 12 to 24 months? System-Level Design asked industry leaders that q... » read more

Keeping Pace With Moore’s Law


By Ann Steffora Mutschler As the number of transistors doubles with each move to a smaller manufacturing process technology, there are questions as to whether the current cadre of place and route tools will be able to keep in lock step. Have no fear, assured Saleem Haider, senior director of marketing for physical design and DFM at Synopsys. “For the increase in densities that we get with... » read more

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